They sat quietly for a moment, each with their hands neatly folded on top of each other, on the table in front of them, and looked distantly at us. My head swam for a moment with the hallucination that we were about to be arraigned before an ideological tribunal, before I realised that the distant formality of their manner probably meant that they were at least as shy of us as we were of them.
One or two of them were wearing a type of grey uniform tunic, one was wearing the old Maoist blue tunic, others were more casually dressed. They ranged in age from about mid-twenties to mid-sixties.
`The committee welcomes you to Tongling,' began the interpreter, `and is honoured by your visit.' He introduced them one by one, each in turn nodding to us with a slightly nervous smile. One was the Conservation Vice-Chief, another the Association Chief-Secretary, another the Vice Chief-Secretary, and so on.
I sat feeling that we were stuck in the middle of some gigantic misunderstanding about something, and tried desperately to think of some way of looking intelligent and not letting on that I was merely a science fiction comedy novelist on holiday.
Mark, however, seemed perfectly at his ease. He explained simply and concisely who we were, missing out the science fiction comedy bit, outlined the nature of our project, said why we were interested in the baiji, and asked them an intelligent opening question about the reserve they were building.
I relaxed. I realised, of course, that talking intelligently about conservation projects to large committees in languages he didn't know was part of what he did for a living.
They explained to us that the dolphin reserve was what they called a `semi-nature reserve.' Its purpose was to constrain the animals within a protected area without taking them out of their natural environment.
A little upstream of Tongling, opposite the town of Datong, there is an elbow-shaped bend in the river. In the crook of the elbow lie two triangular islands, between which runs a channel of water. The channel is about one and a half kilometres long, five metres deep, and between forty and two hundred metres wide, and this channel will be the dolphins' semi-nature reserve.
Fences of bamboo and metal are being constructed at either end of the channel, through which water from the main river flows continuously. A huge amount of remodelling and construction work is being done to make this possible. A large artificial hospital and holding pools are being built on one of the islands to hold injured or newly captured dolphins. A fish farm is being built on the other to feed them.
The scale of the project is enormous. '~
It is very, very expensive, the committee said, solemnly, and they can't even be sure that it will work. But they have to try. The baiji, they explained, is very important to them and it is their duty to protect it.
Mark asked them how on earth they raised the money to do it. It had all been put into operation in an extraordinarily short time.
Yes, they said, we have had to work very, very fast.
They had raised money from many sources. A substantial amount came from the central government, and more again from local government. Then there were many donations from local people and businesses.
They had also, they said a little hesitantly, gone into the business of public relations, and they would welcome our comments on this. Chinese knew little of such matters, but we, as Westerners, must surely be experts.
First, they said, they had persuaded the local brewery to use the baiji as their trademark. Had we tried Baiji Beer? It was of a good quality, now much respected in all of China. Then others had followed. The committee had entered into...
Here there was a bit of a vocabulary problem, which necessitated a little discussion with the interpreter before the right phrase at last emerged.
They had entered into licensing agreements. Local businesses had put money into the project, in return for which they were licensed to use the baiji. symbol, which in turn made good publicity for the baiji dolphin.
So now there was not only Baiji Beer, there was also the Baiji Hotel, Baiji shoes, Baiji Cola, Baiji computerised weighing scales, Baiji toilet paper, Baiji phosphorus fertiliser, and Baiji Bentonite.
Bentonite was a new one on me, and I asked them what it was.
They explained that Bentonite was a mining product used in the production of toothpaste, iron and steel casting, and also as an additive for pig food. Baiji Bentonite was a very successful product. Did we, as experts, think that this public relations was good?
We said it was absolutely astonishing, and congratulated them.
They were very gratified to know this, they said, from Western experts in such matters.
We felt more than a little abashed at these encomiums. It was very hard to imagine anywhere in the Western world that would be capable of responding with such prodigious speed, imagination and communal determination to such a problem. Although the committee told us that they hoped that, since Tongling had recently been declared an open city to visitors for the first time, the dolphins and the semi-nature reserve might bring tourists and tourist money to the area, it was very clear that this was not the primary impulse.
At the end they said, 'The residents in the area gain some profit - that's natural - but we have more profound plans, that is to protect the dolphin as a species, not to let it become extinct in our generation. Its protection is our duty. As we know that only two hundred pieces of this animal survive it may go extinct if we don't take measures to prevent it, and if that happens we will feel guilty for our descendants and later generations.'
We left the room feeling, for the first time in China, uplifted. It seemed that, for all the stilted and awkward formality of the meeting, we had had our first and only real glimpse of the Chinese mind. They took it as their natural duty to protect this animal, both for its own sake and for that of the future world. It was the first time we had been able to see beyond our own assumptions and have some insight into theirs.
I ordered the Thousand Year Old Eggs again that night, determined to try and enjoy them.
Rare, or Medium Rare?
Richard Lewis is a man who has worked out a foolproof way of getting snappy answers to his questions.
He drives his Landrover (well, not actually his Landrover, but the Landrover of anyone foolhardy enough to lend him one) with what can only be described as pizzazz along Mauritian roads that were built with something less than pizzazz in mind. The roads are often narrow and windy, and where they are tarmacked, the Tarmac tends to finish with an abrupt six-inch drop at the edge. Richard drives along these with a pizzazz that borders dangerously on élan, and when he asks you a question he turns and looks at you and doesn't look back at the road again until you've answered. Mortal terror is not the best state of mind in which to try and frame intelligent answers, but you have to try.
We had managed OK with `How was the flight? (`Fine!') and 'How was the meal? (`Fine!') and 'Feeling jet-lagged? (°We're fine!'), but then we got to what he clearly regarded as being the crunch, so to speak
`Why are you coming all the way to Mauritius to look for some crappy old fruitbat? The Landrover veered frighteningly.
One of the first things you need to know about Richard Lewis, indeed the thing you need to know about him, is that he's an ornithologist. Once you know that, everything else more or less falls into place.
'I just couldn't figure it out,' he protested, twisted half round in his seat to harangue us. `You're going to Rodrigues? To look for a fruitbat? It's not even particularly rare.'
`Well, it's all relative,' protested Mark. 'It may not be particularly rare by Mauritian standards, but it is the rarest fruitbat in the...'
`Why don't you stay here on Mauritius for heaven's sake?'
`Well...'
`What do you know about Mauritius? Anything?'
`Well,' I said, `I know that... er, there's a lorry coming...'
`Never mind about that. I'll take care of the lorries. What do you know about Mauritius?
`I know that it was originally colonised by the
Dutch, and when they left it was taken over by the French who lost it to Britain after the Napoleonic Wars. So it's an ex-British colony, part of the Commonwealth. The inhabitants speak French or Creole. The law is basically English and you're, er, supposed to drive on the left...'
`All right, you've read the guide book. But do you know about the birds here? Don't you know about the pink pigeon? The echo parakeet? Don't you know about the Mauritius kestrel?'
'Yes, but...'
`Then why are you going off to the stupid island of Rodrigues to look for some ridiculous fruitbat? We've got a bunch of them here at the captive breeding centre if you really want to see one. Common as muck, stupid things. You'd be much better off staying here and seeing some real stuff. Jesus!'
He had suddenly caught an inadvertent glimpse of the road ahead of us and had to yank hard on the steering wheel to avoid an oncoming truck.
Tell you what,' he said, turning round again. `How long have you got? Two weeks??
'Yes,' said Mark hurriedly.
`And you were planning to spend two days here and then fly to Rodrigues to spend, what, ten days, searching for the world's rarest fruitbat?'
`Yes.'
'OK. Here's what you do instead. You stay here for ten days, and then go off to Rodrigues for two days. Right?
`Will we find it in two days?'
Yes.'
`How do you know??
'Because I'll tell you exactly where to find it. Take you ten minutes. Take a couple of photos, go home.'
Oh.
'So you're staying here, right??
'Er...'
We were swaying erratically along, more or less in the middle of the road. Another truck hove into sight ahead of us, frantically flashing its lights. Richard was still looking round at us.
`Agreed?' he insisted. `You'll stay?'
'Yes! Yes! We'll stay!'
`Right. Good. I should think so too. You'll get to meet Carl then as well. He's brilliant, but completely mad. Jesus!'
The brilliant but completely, mad. Carl Jones is a tall Welshman in his late thirties, and there are those who say of him that his sheer perverse bloody-mindedness is the major thing that stands in the way of the almost total destruction of the ecology of Mauritius . It was Carl that Mark had contacted to make the arrangements for our trip, and it had been quite apparent from the first moment that we set foot on Mauritius that he was a man to contend with. When we told the immigration official at the airport that we would be staying `with someone called Carl Jones at somewhere called Black River ,' it had produced the unexpected and unnerving response of hysterical laughter, and also a friendly pat on the back.
When Carl met us at Richard's house, he greeted us with a scowl, leant in the doorframe, and growled, 'I hate media people.' Then he noticed our tape recorder and suddenly grinned impishly.
`Oh! Is that on? he asked.
`Not at the moment.'
`Turn it on, quick, turn it on!'
We turned it on.
`I really hate media people!' he boomed at it. `Did you get that? Do you think it'll come out all right?'
He peered at the recorder to make sure the tape really was running.
`You know I once did an interview for Woman's Hour on the radio,' he said, shaking his head in wonderment at the folly of a malign and silly world. `I hate media people, they take up all my time and don't pay me very much - but anyway... the interviewer said to me that he was sick of boring scientists and could I tell him about my work but be sure to mention women and babies. So I told him that I preferred women field assistants to men, that we reared lots of baby birds, and that women were better at looking after baby birds because they were more sensitive and all that. And it went out!'
This rendered him speechless with laughter and he tottered helplessly out of the room and was not seen again for hours.
'That was Carl,' said Richard. `He's great. He's really brilliant. Honestly. Don't worry about him being a complete sod.'
We quickly discovered that we had fallen in with a bunch of passionately obsessed people. The first obsession for Carl and for Richard was birds. They loved them with an extraordinary fervour, and had devoted their entire adult lives to working in the field, often in awful conditions and on horribly low budgets, to save rare birds, and the environments they live in, from extinction. Richard had trained in the Philippines , working to save the Philippines monkey-eating eagle, a wildly improbable looking piece of flying hardware that you would more readily expect to see coming in to land on an aircraft carrier than nesting in a tree. From there he had, in 1985, come to Mauritius , where the entire ecology of an island formerly famous for its abundant beauty is in desperate trouble.
They work with a manic energy that is disconcerting for a while until you begin to appreciate the enormity of the problems facing them, and the speed with which those problems are escalating. Ecologically speaking, Mauritius is a war zone and Carl, Richard and others - including Wendy Strahm, an equally obsessed botanist - are like surgeons working just behind the front line. They are immensely kind people, often exhausted by the demands that their caring makes on them. Their impatience often erupts into a kind of wild black humour because, faced with so much that is absolutely critical, they can't afford the time for anything that is merely very, very urgent.
The focus of their work is Carl's captive breeding centre in the village of Black River , and Richard took us along to see it the next day.
We screeched to a halt outside the gate set in a six foot high stone wall and went in.
Inside was a large sandy courtyard, ringed with low wooden buildings, large aviaries and cages. The warm air was rich with the sounds of flapping and cooing and sharp, bracing smells. Several very, very large tortoises were roaming about the centre of the yard completely free, presumably because virtually anybody would be able to beat them to the gate if they suddenly decided to make a break for it.
There you are,' said Richard, pointing at a large cage off to one side in which someone appeared to have hung a number of small broken umbrellas, 'Rodrigues fruitbats. You can relax now, you've seen 'em. Look at them later, they're boring. They're nothing to what else we've got here. Pink pigeons for a start... this place has got some of the rarest, sexiest birds in the world. And you want to see the real stars? I'll see if Carl's in. He should be the one to show you.'
He took us for a quick hunt, but Carl wasn't there. There was, however, someone who was besottedly in love with him. Richard beckoned us in.
`This is Pink,' he said.
We looked.
Pink gazed at us intently with his two large, deep brown eyes. He fidgeted a little with his feet, clawing at his perch, and seemed tense, expectant, and slightly irritated to see us.
`Pink's a Mauritius kestrel,' said Richard, `but he's basically weird.'
`Really?' said Mark. `Doesn't look it.'
'What does he look like to you?
'Well he's quite small. He's got sleek brown outer plumage on his wings, mottled brown and white breast feathers, impressive set of talons...'
`In other words you think he looks like a bird.'
'Well, yes...'
`He'd be shocked to know you thought that.'
'What do you mean?
`Well, one of the problems with breeding birds in captivity is that they sometimes have to be reared by humans, which leads to all sorts of misunderstandings on the bird's part. When a bird hatches from its egg it doesn't have much of a clear picture of what's what in the world, and it falls in love with the first thing that feeds it, which in Pink's case was Carl. It's called "imprinting" and it's a major problem because you can't undo it. Once he's made up his mind that he's a human, he...'
'He actually thinks he's a human?' I asked.
'Oh yes. Well, if he thinks Carl's his mother it more or less follows, doesn't it? They may not be brilliant, but they're logical. He's quite convinced he's a human. He completely ignores the other kestrels, hasn't got time for them, they're jus
t a bunch of birds as far as he's concerned. But when Carl walks in here he goes completely berserk. It's a problem because, of course, you can't introduce an imprinted bird into the wild, it wouldn't know what the hell to do. Wouldn't nest, wouldn't hunt, it would just expect to go to restaurants and stuff. Or at least, it would expect to be fed it wouldn't survive by itself.
`However, he does have a very important function in the aviary.
You see, the young birds that we've hatched here don't come to sexual maturity at the same time, so when the females start getting sexy, the males are not ready to handle it. The females are bigger and more belligerent and often beat the males up. So when that happens, we collect semen from Pink, and...'
'How do you do that? asked Mark.
'In a hat.'
'I thought you said in a hat.'
`That's right. Carl puts on this special hat, which is a bit like a rather strange bowler hat with a rubber brim, Pink goes mad with desire for Carl, flies down and fucks the hell out of his hat.'
`What?
'He ejaculates into the brim. We collect the drop of semen and use it to inseminate a female.'
`Strange way to treat your mother.'
'He's a strange bird. But he does serve a useful purpose in spite of being psychologically twisted.'
Setting up the captive breeding centre on Mauritius is one of Carl's major failures. in fact it is the result of probably the most spectacular and brilliant failure of his life.
`They always thought I would be a failure when I was a boy,' he told us when he turned up later, incredibly late for something. 'I was hopeless, a complete write-off. Never did any work, wasn't interested in anything at all. Well, anything other than animals. Nobody at my school in Wales thought it was very useful being only interested in animals, but I had about fifty of them, to my father's despair, in cages all over the backyard. Badgers and foxes, wild Welsh polecats, owls, hawks, macaws, jackdaws, everything. I even managed, just as a schoolboy, to breed kestrels in captivity.
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